my classmates are awesome

Hey World,

So, happy Thursday!! Oh man I love Thursdays, well for the most part.

It's been a loooong week. We are still in the heat wave and the AC at school is still broken so it's been painful to be in class all week. Well there have been points where it's been less painful. I've rediscovered my love of Hebrew grammar and conjugating verbs. When I get really into it or when we are doing an exercise in class my friend tells me I'm in "verbland." It's a good place. Hebrew grammar is pretty cool, it's like a puzzle and there are all these rules about what vowels go where. You can make fun of me, I understand :-)

So last night, after a long week of Ulpan , we had an HUC talent show. It was super fun. Let me just say there are a TON of talented people here this year. I was really impressed at people's skill but also the ability to be goofy. There was a good mix of serious and funny. My talent? I sit in the audience and make people feel talented. haha. I didn't break out my pi reciting talent just yet, I don't think my classmates are ready for that just yet (or maybe I'm just not willing to admit the full extent of my dorkiness yet).

So to go along with the talent show there was a silent auction where different people offered services for us to bid on. I won a guitar lesson. Yay! I'm learning guitar and am getting semi-decent, so it will be nice to have someone sit down with me and help me.

After the talent show was over a bunch of us went out to a bar. It ended up being a pretty large group and we were joking that we should just pretend to be a birthright (taglit) group because we looked like one. We decided we were a birthright group from BYU (brigham young university), just because I don't think there are any jews there. I dunno I thought it was funny.

Yeah it was an AWESOME night, definitely much needed for me. My classmates are so cool. Also to add to everything prop 8 was overturned. That was pretty exciting to find out. Also I think it's funny that the judge is judge Walker. Definitely representing the Walker name well :-)

Today started out really frustrating. I don't want to get into it too much because I'll go on a long rant that won't be so interesting. Basically we were discussing what all of us in the HUC year in Israel program want our community to look like and how we want to organize it. OY! There just wasn't enough structure and everyone had opinions to share about minute things so it got super complicated and frustrating and not everyone was heard.

For me the hardest part was suppressing my urge to just take over. It's hard, most if not all of us in the program are leaders. If we weren't we probably would not have gotten in. So it's hard because how do you lead, but also step back and let other people lead and find that balance. It's very frustrating. The whole time we were talking I just wanted to take charge and be like ok this is what we should do and this is the way to do it because I have experience and I know this works.

I was joking with some people that I should stage a hostile takeover and run everything. I mean my sorority was bigger than this class, so I could handle it :-) Of course I'm not serious, and it's very valuable to have everyones input etc etc but it was just super frustrating today in our talks.

So after that we split up into different committees and from there the day got more positive. I think it was because we started talking about more concrete things than theoretical. I joined the social committee which I am super excited about. (I guess that's the sorority president in me). We brainstormed a lot of great ideas and I'm pumped to help plan them and have them happen for real.

Life is good. Also skype is awesome (minus the slow internet/video issue).